In Milan, health with a difference

Peace Times 11

For some months in Milan, there is something new amidst the coffee bars in the Brera district (Via San Marco 5). It is the club of Aeimm - the Italian Association for the Education of the Mentally Ill -, a bar which is partially staffed by psychiatric patients in the last stages of their treatment.

The group - baptised «Timé» which in Greek means «honour and recognition of human dignity» - is part of a vast therapeutic programme directed by Giampietro Savuto, a psychotherapist who, since 1972, has worked in the field of rehabilitation of psychiatric patients and since 1985, when he left the existing public structures of therapy, has searched for new approaches to their care.

Aware of the fact that many of these patients live in extremely isolated conditions - what could be worse - Savuto decided to try to make them experience life using «normal» environments: home, school, theatre, workplaces and so on. Today, collaboration with around ten companies in the tertiary and manual sectors allows his patients to have this kind of emotional experience.

With the help of 30 assistants, he now runs two communities in the heart of Milan, in which family life is maintained. During the day the patients follow various external activities, some are always accompanied, others not. Then there are the «family rituals», pizza on Tuesday, theatre on Thursday, trips on Sunday. The average stay in the community is two years; after which there are some flats in normal Milanese apartment blocks, where patients go to live for an intermediate period, and which they manage almost single handed. The Aeimm, whose president is the actress Ottavia Piccolo, was born two years ago, «With two precise objectives - explains Savuto - to heal the patients and to modify the dominant image in our culture. The mass media only show «mad people» in extreme and chronic cases, but our relationship with these people must not be of fear».

Enrica Mazzi